Another important aspect of Quora, which stems from the community’s atmosphere rather than being a built-in feature, is the fact that answers tend to be longer and more in-depth than other Answers websites. Length doesn’t necessarily equal quality or value, but it does show that Quora contributors put more effort into their responses.

And then there’s the Ask To Answer feature of Quora that allows users to request an answer from other Quora users of their choice. You can use this feature on any question, even if you weren’t the one who asked the question. And when combined with Quora’s Online Now feature, you can essentially receive an immediate answer.

Follow Relevant Interests

The Quora community is big. Topics are used to categorize the multitude of questions asked every day on the site. These topics range from Books to Music to Food to History to Finance to so much more. And the best part is that you can follow the topics that interest you.

Every user has a Quora home page that acts as an activity feed. New questions show up in the feed, much like new tweets would show up in a Twitter feed, which gives you the opportunity to answer the questions you know about OR follow up on questions that might catch your eye.

If it wasn’t obvious already, the questions that show up in your feed are limited to the topics that you follow, so it’s a great way to ignore all Quora activity from areas irrelevant to your interests.

Not too long ago, Quora also introduced a Reading List feature that lets you collect questions, answers, and posts. It’s useful for two main purposes: saving remarkable content so you can return to it in the future and building up a list of interesting content that you can read later in case you can’t at the moment.

Establish Authority, Build Your Brand

What incentive is there for an expert to participate in Quora?

At the moment, there’s no system of monetary compensation for top contributors. Doesn’t that seem like a one-sided relationship? Is it fair for experts to share their expertise so freely? What drives them to be productive members of Quora?

User profiles on Quora provide several fields that can be used to establish one’s authority on a given subject. What topics do you know about? Where have you worked? Where have you studied? They lend credibility to your answers so that they carry more weight and attention.

This kind of authority can be helpful when trying to build a brand, especially since Quora users are displayed using their real names. For example, being a regular contributor of high-quality answers for the Venture Capital topic could increase visibility for your consulting startup.

Another way to build authority and visibility, is to write posts using Quora Blogs. These blog posts, which aren’t restricted by the Q&A format, show up in relevant topics and can be seen by tens of thousands of viewers every month. Most blog platforms only share your writings with those who follow you, but Quora puts your content out in front of people who are interested in it even if they aren’t following you.

Take Quora With You Everywhere

Estimates of how many Quora users interact using a mobile device range anywhere from 20 to 65 percent — an official quote puts it at 40% — but there’s one truth we can conclude from that regardless of the exact number: a significant portion of the userbase regularly takes Quora on the go.

There are better technical Q&A sites for essentially everything. If you know what expert you are interested in the opinion of, it's very easy to find their blog or articles by a general web search. In general http://linkedin.com has far better expert contribution.

The weak redirect mechanism for redundant or similar questions is a failure. Very few redundant questions actually get redirected so that the good answers appear in one thread, entailing a lot of searching that is better done on the general web.

Simple upvote/downvote mechanisms for ranking answers fail, and have reliably always failed. Of what possible interest is it that 20 Bible college students downvote an agnostics' eloquent answer on whether Jesus existed historically, or 15 fringe US libertarians upvote an absurd counterfactual claim that the US Republican Party or conservatives in general favor small non-intrusive government? On any even remotely controversial topic where one might seek a neutral or informed opinion, sadly Quora is a series of echo chambers for self-congratulating fringe groups. With about the worst moderators on the Internet, actively intervening to block or threaten anyone who expresses a strongly worded opinion contrary to theirs on some favorite topic.

The "gamification" aspect is interesting but again, it has failed. Rife "gaming" of this algorithm leads to many glib one-liner "first post" answers that are seen by many people on popular questions on quickly upvoted. Driving down better answers to invisibility and obscurity. Similarly, good first answers that are disagreeable to specific people who monitor those topics, tend to be downvoted and disappear instantly and remain invisible as few or no casual readers check the "collapsed" answers that were initially downvoted.

While some notable people like Jimmy Wales and Mark Cuban do answer questions directed specifically to themselves, and gain vast upvotes (and thus "credits") for such trivia as what they themselves had for breakfast, and how not to offend them when begging them for money, their answers are not interesting as a rule. Far better to read real interviews with better framed questions.

Some communities like militant atheists seem to frequent Quora perhaps attracted by the participation of Stephen Fry. However ask yourself if you really need to read stuff like this:

"Q: Why is Stephen Fry such a big deal?"

"A: I don't know. What if he's not? - Stephen Fry"

A cute source of one-liners perhaps, but not a serious forum, and very unlikely to overtake Yahoo, Google, ask.fm or any of the WikiHow or Wikimedia projects for general difficult answers. Most answers do not even contain any out-links at all, let alone verifiable sources like Wikipedia.

Looking for Quora answers that link to Wikipedia articles is often a useful search strategy, because it can help find the exact terminology to describe the problem you have, or the field of study that is interested in it, or the name of a part, or whatever. But that is equally true of every other Q&A site on the Internet.

Finally if Adam D'Angelo, Marc Bodnick, the private equity firms they are from, and Yair Livne, are your favorite people on Earth, then by all means go ahead and make them rich by helping them perfect their flawed model. But I don't advise it. Wikimedia projects are Creative Commons licensed and truly trying to make the world a better place. I suggest helping those along instead with the precious hours you spend editing online content.

I am an active member on Quora. Initially, the feed may not be as per your interest But once you start reading and upvoting some answers, the feed finds your area of interest and gives good questions and answers. The other benefit is that you can get answers from the experts in the field like Thomas Cormen for algorithms, Brain Bi for C++ etc.,